Google's "free food" is not free

In the summer and fall of 2006, I went through a multi-month process to
interview at Google. After a bunch of phone calls, a flight out to
Silly Valley for on-sites, and even more phone calls, they finally
offered me a job. Then we had to talk about money.

At the time, I had read nothing about negotiation and didn't know what
I was doing. They offered a sum which was in fact an improvement over
what I had been making, but it wasn't the kind of offset I was looking
for.

What I find interesting now is that they had a ready-made comeback:
they'd "go away to calculate" for a bit, and then say that the meals
alone were worth some amount of money. I think they told me 15 to 20
thousand dollars at the time. I've heard other values from other people
who were told similar things during their hiring process.

The point is, they deliberately inserted the food as a part of the
bigger picture in lieu of more money. They set it up so that you would
be placated by it somehow.

At that point, I was still buying the hype of the early days, and I
now regret to say that it worked on me. I took it hook, line and sinker
and accepted their offer. My effective salary was some amount of cash
plus the food as it was right then and there.

For a while, this worked. I was able to get a decent meal at regular
intervals without having to hunt for it. There was a certain amount of
consistency if you knew where to look for it. One cafe in particular
was actually an import of a local chain of taquerias called Andale. You
could be sure of finding certain foods there every single day, and not
surprisingly, they saw me a lot.

Then something changed. It all seems to coincide with a certain new CFO
coming on board, but I can't prove that's what happened. All I know is
that certain things started being cut. Entire meals were eliminated
from certain cafes. Some that were open for breakfast and dinner in
addition to lunch were now lunch-only. Others slid their hours back.
Still more wound up being underprovisioned so that even though they
might have been open, they ran out of food well before closing time.

Similar things happened to the famous micro kitchens. Over time, many
of them were either closed, drained of most items, or "temporarily shut
down so as to become a media center which will link to another office".
Well, they were shut down, but they were never turned into anything
else.

The Friday morning bagel or donut supplies also were curtailed. Sure,
they still existed, but you now had to go hunt for them. They were no
longer set up in a microkitchen near your office. They would now
appear only in certain cafes.

At first, the powers that be claimed it was "being green" or "supporting
good nutrition", but enough people finally cornered them and got them to
admit it was about the cost. All of that other stuff was just a cover
story.

My snarky remark at the time was "sure, they're being green... money is
green".

It really says something about a company when they use their own
employees as their safety net. Sure, go ahead and screw the employees
while the economy is bad. They'll stay on and grumble about it, because
they can't go anywhere.

But what happens when the economy improves? Those wounds will never
heal. Anyone with half a brain will say "hey, these guys are evil!" and
will bail for greener pastures. And, not surprisingly, many did. The
brain drain has been remarkable. It's not so much that other companies
(Facebook and Twitter are the two obvious candidates) are
pulling so much as Google has been pushing them out
the door.

I learned a powerful lesson here. If you allow them to placate you with
some kind of luxury, don't be too surprised when they take it away.
They will conveniently forget that it was used as a bargaining tactic.

Or, worse, they'll assign blame to "rogue contractors" and say it was
never their policy to do that. Right.